I recently received a letter from the local council informing me that rather than regularly sending letters by post they would like to notify me of certain information by email. They then invited me to help them ‘save money’ in this way. But what were they really saving? If they had said they would like to save resources, or save paper, or save the postman’s time, this would have been understandable but in their muddle of monetary thinking they are no doubt convinced that it is ‘money’ they are saving, whatever that might be!
From an individual’s perspective such an aspiration might appear to make sense but from a societal perspective it does not add up. A visitor from another planet, upon being told that humanity was embarking on a money saving exercise would hardly know what this meant. A local council is surely representative of society as a whole (rather than one entity I competition with others). Economists often talk about this with the tag-line ‘the fallacy of composition’ but another way to describe it would be to point out that if humanity were to consolidate its balance sheets the monetary components would all cancel each other out. Society, aka, humanity cannot save money. Anyone (be it an individual or an organisation) representing a societal point of view, should not therefore be talking of saving money because all they can mean is that it should be in one persons ‘pocket / account’ rather than another’s. It may have changed location but nothing else has changed … or been saved. Why this talk of, this addiction to, the notion of saving money?
Can we not strike out the abstraction and be concrete again - save resources, save effort, save time even … but don’t say that because the ‘money’ is in your pocket rather than someone elses, that it has been saved!
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